[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Wednesday, July 08, 2015 01:21:40 AM Peter Huewe wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In order to continue our traditions I would like to propose again the topic of 
> recruitment, but this time not only limiting to the hobbyists market.
> 
> We are definitely short on reviewers and thus have mostly overloaded 
> maintainers.
> For testers it's usually even worse - how many patches are actually tested?
> Judging from what I read on LKML not that many.
> 
> So we should definitely discuss:
> - how can we encourage hobbyists to become regular contributors
> -- how to keep people interested, the drop-out rates are huge.
> - encourage regular contributors to become reviewers and testers
> - reviewers to become co-maintainers and finally maintainers (once the 
> original maintainer is used up or moves up/on)

Good topic.

Unfortunately, there are not too many incentives for people to become
code reviewers or testers, or at least to spend more time reviewing patches.

Most of the time there's a little to no recognition for doing that work and,
quite frankly, writing code is more rewarding than that for the majority of
people anyway.

The only way to address this problem I can see is to recognize reviewers
*much* more than we tend to do and not just "encourage" them, because that's
way insufficient.

Thanks,
Rafael